Mint Digital

I’m at the BBC Innovation Labs in Yorkshire this week.

The Labs are made up of 10 teams, 5 mentors and 1 Development Producer from BBC Research & Innovation. 5 BBC commissioners arrived today.

Each team consists of 2 people. Our team has 3 people in it. The teams works on the project they submitted for the Labs. We (Different & Mint) submitted against the Fiction & Entertainment Brief.

The mentors run a series of workshops. The workshops are designed to push the ideas to the limits. All the techniques are user-centered. This is a very important part of the development process at the BBC.

The teams work towards presenting an idea through a compelling and convincing story. The final presentation happens at the end of the week.

Here’s what we’ve done so far.

Monday AM:

• Frank Boyd from Unexpected Media made us play silly games to help break the ice. It worked. Some of the guys are now wondering the corridors in their robes!
• Discovered that the BBC prefer to be presented with a “Value Proposition”, rather than a “Pitch”.
• Found out that the Labs attempt to do 3 things. (1) Bring innovation in from the outside. (2) Build relationships with indies. (3) Enable indies to get together.

Monday PM:

• Discussed each idea using the Edward de Bono 6 Thinking Hats method. This really stretched our brains. It ripped the ideas to shreds and made us think about the idea from all angles.

Tuesday AM:

• Talked about about the importance of scenarios and how they help us understand how people will use a product or service.
• Went into detail about the 5 types of scenarios. (1) User lifecycle. (2) 90%, 9%, 1% usage. (3) User modes. (4) Before, during and after. (5) 1st, 2nd, nth use. (I’ll expand on these another time and write another post).

Tuesday PM:

• Created 2 personas. Personas are profiles of people who might actually use our product or service.
• Developed user scenarios based on the personas we created. These turned into user journeys.
• Sharpened up our idea and presented to the Mentors. It was now too sharp and felt too rational. We lightened up and made it more fun. Presented again and finally had something that seemed cool and valuable.

Wednesday AM:

• Spent the morning working on the presentation for our idea.

Wednesday PM:

• Presented our idea to the commissioner.
• Had an open conversation and found out what we needed to do to turn an idea into a commissionable piece of work.

Read about days 4 and 5 of the Labs